Word: cartoons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...blasphemy." The Justice Minister proposed reviving the law in the wake of his death, to use against the kind of offensive speech Van Gogh was killed over, but a decision has yet to be reached. In France last week, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo republished the 12 disputed Danish cartoons, while devoting its cover to a sketch of a red-faced Muhammad holding his head in his hands and saying "It's tough being loved by idiots." The government-sanctioned French Council of the Muslim Faith (cfcm) tried to stop publication as an instance of "racial and religious abuse...
Given the excesses of the protests--which included retaliatory cartoons mocking the Holocaust--it's not surprising that some in Europe and the U.S. have lashed back. The Bush Administration initially declared the caricatures offensive while denouncing the violence. But as the protests turned violent and critics grumbled about the Administration's failure to stand up for free speech and the U.S.'s suddenly besieged European allies, the Bush team ratcheted up the rhetoric. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "There is no excuse for violence," and she accused regimes in Iran and Syria of deliberately stirring up anti-Western...
...nothing else, the editors of Jyllands-Posten--a right-of-center newspaper based in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city--knew that publishing cartoon images of Muhammad would get them attention. That was the point: last September the paper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, invited 40 Danish cartoonists to submit caricatures of the Prophet in a deliberate attempt to provoke a debate about what Rose perceived as the stifling of coverage of issues related to Islam and Denmark's 200,000 Muslim residents. A leading Danish religious historian, Tim Jensen, warned that some Muslims would take offense at the images...
Still, the initial reaction remained muted. Two weeks after the appearance of the cartoons, Muslim leaders organized a mostly peaceful demonstration of 3,500 people in Copenhagen, demanding that the paper issue an apology for the drawings. The paper rebuffed the demand. But the tempest might have remained a largely local dispute had Prime Minister Rasmussen not compounded the editors' intransigence by refusing to meet with the ambassadors of 11 Muslim countries to discuss the cartoon flap. "This was a major mistake," says Denmark-based Bashy Quraishy, president of the European Network Against Racism. "I have never in my long...
...Rasmussen's slight, Muslim activists in Denmark embarked on a provocative campaign of their own. In mid-November, Abu Laban, the country's most radical imam, made arrangements on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Faith to send a delegation of Muslims to the Middle East to publicize the cartoon issue. They brought with them a 43-page dossier that contained the 12 cartoons and three even more inflammatory drawings, not published by Jyllands-Posten but allegedly sent to Danish Muslims in the wake of the initial protests. (One of the images, purportedly showing Muhammad with a pig's nose...